Nova Project #1 (16 page)

He's trying, but the boat isn't cooperating, and he relinquishes control to Josh with relief. Josh steers away from the rocks, speeding toward the dolphins with a roar before figuring out how to slow down.

Back in the gaming room, Miguel is wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but here his arms are bare and warm under the sun. A safe sun, presumably—he wouldn't sit out in it in real life. Leah's dark skin glows with sweat, and Nick's hair shines impossibly blond. The dolphins gather around, close enough now to touch. He doesn't. Grace squeezes her hands between her thighs, but Leah reaches out, lays her palm on a smooth, silvery nose.

“Are you here to show us where to go?” she asks. It squeaks and bobs its head as though it understood her, pulls away, and turns in unison with the others.

Speed and wind pick up, ruffling Miguel's hair. He is alive and in the sun.

Who cares if it's a game?

Grace is the first to spot the flag, rippling in the distance. The dolphins race ahead to circle around it.

“Cache,” says Miguel when the boat has stopped and he
can speak normally. He summons the diving gear, it lands in a pile at their feet. Large pieces of biomech, like lungs but clearly meant to be worn on the outside, are attached to a hose and mouthpiece.

“Should one of us stay up here with the boat?” Nick asks. “We don't know what's down there.”

“Good plan. Any takers?”

“I will,” says Josh.

“Cool.”

The rest of them get ready. He can't remember the last time he went swimming, though it was definitely in the game, and not like this. The water laps around his shoulders, cool and wet, the dolphins have moved away. Nick, Leah, and Grace bob around him.

The world changes to greens and blues and rainbows of fish—or whatever—that swarm a dazzling reef. If ever he needed a reminder that Chimera was the product of two imaginations, this is it. Nothing is both easier and harder to imagine than history.

“Can we talk down here?” Nick wonders aloud. “Yeah? Sweet.”

They aren't here for the reef. They are here for the ship wrecked upon it, a few hundred feet away through the crystal-clear water. It's like flying, weightless and free. Breath comes easily through the diving lungs. Laughter bubbles like air. Leah
does a somersault, grinning, then gives Miguel a look that can mean only one thing.

He kicks, outpacing her but not by enough. She's right there, keeping up with him as he races through the blue, the ship looming larger and larger, its skeleton like the hulking carcass of a dead sea creature.

He wins only because his arms are longer, fingertips stretched to touch rotting wood and rusted metal. “Ha!” he says victoriously, chest aching with the effort. Worth it for the look on her face.

Together they wait for Nick and Grace to catch up, the four of them swim through a gap in the hull.

As always, they don't know what they're looking for, so they spread out to explore, Grace taking what's left of the top deck, Nick the galleys, Leah the lifeboats that saved no one.

Miguel goes down, deeper, following broken pipes and skirting sheets of jagged steel.

You come to a sealed room. The lever is rusted shut.

“I think it's here,” he says, “Down at the bottom.

“I think it's the old engine room,” he tells them when they arrive. “Any bright ideas?”

“Cache. Ax,” says Nick. It appears in his hand, and they all stand back. Miguel's flinches at the first strike, is more prepared for the second, the third. Chimera follows the laws of physics when it suits; the water slows the movement, dulls
the assault. The ax slips from Nick's grip, spins through the water, heads for Miguel's face. Leah catches it an instant before impact, overcompensates, smashes it against the wall behind her. The head breaks free and, unbuoyed by its handle, crashes to their feet.

“Uh. Maybe not that then,” says Nick.

Miguel moves closer to the door, wraps his gloved hands around the lever. It's an effort, even when Nick moves close behind him and adds his own strength, but not an inhuman effort.

Disturbed rust billows, clouds the water in front of them. Metal grinds against itself. Tiny increment by tiny increment, the lever shifts, and the door finally opens with a screech.

Black water rushes out, the crystal blue of the reef long gone, stained by inky darkness. By feel, not sight, they enter the room, bumping into one another and the unseen engine.

But there is a light, not the swirling, living light of an orb, but the faint dull glow of a save point. Beside it a glass bottle hovers. It's not surprising that the bottle is full, but it's surprising that it's corked.

A bottle of water, probably salt water. A vial of oil. A knife. An apple. Miguel caches it and blocks Nick's hand from the save point. He weighs the pros and cons of getting Josh down here. Five would be better than four, but he doesn't know what will happen once they hit the save point. If they have to get
back to the boat, they need Josh keeping it where it is.

If they're sent somewhere else, they'll go without him.

“Josh, you there?”

“Yep. Find anything?”

“Get your gear on and dive. You'll see a ship.”

“On it.”

Once they hit the save point, they can log out and return here whenever they want. Better to do that together.

Even if it means killing a boss twice.

He hears Nick giving Josh directions. He hears Josh cursing that he can't see shit, and several loud bangs. Finally Josh's voice comes from nearby, and Miguel slams his hand down on the button.

Nothing happens.

“Just wait,” Miguel tells himself. Something will come. Patterns repeat. He's never been here before, but he's been
here
before.

Water is everywhere, but from somewhere out in the blackness a current rushes. The ship tilts and shifts as if it were on the surface. The dark lessens, water flooding out of every gap in the hull and not returning.

“We're going up,” says Grace.

“Get out of here and onto the deck,” Miguel tells them, leading the way. The water is at his forehead now. He has to time this right, pull off his lungs at the perfect moment. It
happens on the ladder; he tears them away and breathes clean air. Behind him, the others do the same. He races up the last few rungs and lands on the rotten deck, eyes on the vanishing sea.

He grins as he spots the thing in the distance. The horses were fun and all, definitely different, but this is the kind of boss he's used to: something he can kill.

“Let me guess!” he shouts to Leah. “That's not a fucking fish either!”

Her laughter rings across the water, across the visible bones of ships and sea creatures. But the one coming is alive, flesh, blue-black with scales and spines. Huge wet eyes drip slime and rage. It wants them as badly as he wants it. He scans the area, ducks past Nick to the broken railings that run around the deck. One wrenches free with a scream of rust.

Just for this moment he is in the old Chimera, the one he knows. No rooms of fears, no horses to tame. Just this.

And he is good at this.

“You're mine, you bastard!” he screams as it rises over the deck and swipes a disgusting tentacle at them. The others jump out of the way, but Miguel stands his ground on the slippery deck.

“What are—” Leah shouts as he runs at it, right into the path of another oozing swipe.

“Leading!” he shouts back. Help and cooperation are all
fine and good, but this one, this one is his. It isn't a machine, and he can't take its heart, but he can take its computer-generated life.

It swipes again. The sharp, pointed tentacle curls around his waist, crushing the air from him. Weak point. Weak point . . . where?

There.

He sights, aims, lets the makeshift spear soar from his hand. Watches its flight through the air.

Doesn't see the boss make a last, desperate strike.

Until it's too late. The orb that could save him is gone now, used up.

Searing pain explodes in his chest like a bomb. His own weak point. He hears screams that aren't his, his breath is gone. He touches his wrist, an automatic movement. The information will be useless. The number flashes in black. Shit.

“Got you,” he says as he falls.

E
verything is too bright. Miguel can't see; it's that blinding kind of light that obscures instead of illuminates.

But he's thinking very clearly. Too clearly? Maybe he's still in the game, where everything is detailed, precise. His chest hurts. It's a different kind of pain, though. Focused, not spreading in rippling waves to his fingertips. A sharp, tight line of ow.

He hears voices but not words. His eyes are open but could close so easily, blot out the brightness, and just sleep forever. Temptation drags at his brain and his eyelids, pulling them down, under. He forces his eyes back open. The brightness is thinning, shapes now discernible. The source of the voices. Lots of them.

“God damn it, Mig, wake up.”

Someone is crying and trying not to.

He
is
awake. He can see them.

Can't he?

In the morning before school, sometimes, he'd be sure he was awake, up, getting dressed, only to have his mom come in and shake him.

He opens his eyes again. Anna's face swims in front of him. What the hell is she doing here? Wherever here is. He turns his head toward a green wall.

Oh.

“He's awake!”

“And his ears still work,” Miguel whispers. “Shhhh.”

“Sorry.” Her voice drops several notches. “How are you feeling?” Other faces join hers. His parents, Nick, Leah. One he doesn't recognize except in the way all doctors are immediately identifiable to someone who has seen too many of them.

“How are you feeling?” The doctor this time.

“Um.”

“Good answer,” he says. “We won't know everything for a day or two, but for the moment it looks like the transplant was a success. It's been switched on and is fully operational. Ha-ha.”

“Ha,” says Miguel. There is literally nothing worse than a funny doctor. Every one he has ever met needs a humor transplant. Wait. “Transplant? I—”

“All biomeched up, dude,” says Nick, raising his hand for a high five. “You finally got it.”

“How?”

Nick's eyes dart to Mr. and Mrs. Anderson. Miguel nods. They can hear whatever it is.

“So you got hit right when you took down the boss. Do you remember that?”

Maybe. Some of it. “Yeah,” he says so Nick will get to the point.

“Right, so there was a save point in its skull, if you can believe that. Josh hit it with that badass arm of his, and we got you out of there, called for the medics from the gaming room. They brought you up here, and some dude turned up with a really hot doctor—not you, sorry, man—and told them to give you the transplant.”

“But . . . I thought I'd have to find it, or wait until we won—”

Nick shrugs. “Apparently not.”

“You should have told us,” Leah says, scowling. “I've been wondering for ages what's wrong with you. Why Nick asks you if you're okay every time we have to run for a minute. You try to cover it but you can't, not always. It would've been nice to know our leader could kick it anytime. What if something random had happened earlier?”

“Sorry.” He's not sure if he is, though judging from the look on his mother's face, she's going to do her best to make him feel sorry later. But Mrs. Anderson has a sense of privacy, and he inherited it from her. Leah's not completely wrong that it
was kind of the team's business, but she's a little bit wrong. It's his thing. His problem.

Was.

Still, it's hard not to feel indebted to a girl who's torn a demon's head off with her bare hands for you. He should get her a present.

“Am I on drugs?” he asks.

“We did a few neuro tweaks to ease the pain while you heal,” says the doctor. “They'll wear off soon. In the meantime you should rest. Your heart may be the best it's ever been, but the rest of you isn't. You need to heal. You need sleep.”

“We want to talk to you,” says his mom, “but we'll come back in a bit. Everyone out.”

As soon as the door closes on the last of them, Miguel pulls aside the papery cloth covering his chest. A fine, fresh scar slashes across flesh, already knitting together and almost healed. From under a shroud of skin and muscle, faint lights flash.

He stares at them for so long his neck starts to ache.

So this is it.

He doesn't know what he expected, whether he ever truly let himself think this far. For years, in dreams both asleep and awake, he's thought of what it would be like to reach the end of a level and know that what waited for him on the other side of a quit command was this, a new life. None of this has happened
the right way. He's not complaining, but he always imagined that he'd know, be prepared, not that he'd just wake up truly alive for the first time in his life.

It won't fail. Ever. Something else could take him out, but as the doctor said, his heart is now the healthiest part of him.

He feels like he's back in the first level of the competition, on the ceiling, about to grab the orb. Flipped upside down and closing his fingers around invincibility.

Sleep, the doctor had also said. Yeah, that's likely. But Miguel closes his eyes, sees the blinking lights on the inside of his eyelids and counts each flash the way he used to count his heartbeats.

How long does it take to count to infinity?

He smiles. This is going to change everything.

“You're not rejoining the competition.”

The way his mother says it, it could be a statement or a question. Either way, he hasn't thought about it yet, so he does now.

He actually doesn't have to. Keep going, that is. Another thing he'd never considered. Even if the competition had never come up, what exactly was he planning to do? He always had a vague idea that he'd still play, gather up some other biomech rewards more in line with the actual point of Chimera: to protect them from the sun, the rain, the air. Replace weak,
vulnerable human flesh with impenetrable metal. Be the first to ever beat the game. But would he play as seriously? Would he care as much?

Yes.
He hasn't spent this long getting good at the game to throw it away.

“I don't know,” he says. His father sits on the edge of the slim bed, too high, as all hospital beds are, his toes barely touching the floor.

“We've been following it. Not only your team, all of them. Something else could hurt you.”

“And we just got you back.”

“I never went anywhere,” Miguel protests. “I was here, downstairs. Twenty minutes away from home.” But he knows what they mean. They haven't got him
back,
they suddenly have the healthy son they never had before.

“We know,” she answers. “But think of all the things we can do now. Take a trip somewhere, maybe?”

Only in Chimera has Miguel ever left the city, seen an approximation of the world. They'd never wanted to go too far from the doctors.

“I'll take some time off work,” his father says. “Might as well see some of the world while we can.”

Before it ends. Now that it's likely to end before his heart quits, Miguel can think about that. Nobody knows when it will happen or how. Gradually or so fast nobody on the planet will
even realize. Miguel votes for long and agonizing, if history is an accurate prediction of the future. But it's close, everybody knows it. It's why everybody acts like it isn't happening. Maybe in his lifetime, maybe not. That requires different math now anyway.

“We'll let you rest,” says his mother, and like an alarm falling into silence, it's only now that the worry is gone from her face that he realizes how loud it was.

He's still not going to sleep. His lenses are folded on the bedside table.

Cubes are a lot of things; they're especially good bubbles. Sure, he's checked on the feeds now and then, but mostly he's been focused on getting his own team ahead. A message from Zack blinks.

[Zachary Chan]
Miguel Anderson
Aww, did little baby Mig stop to get an upgrade?

He doesn't bother answering, blinks it away, and checks the team feeds instead.

Just rescued the horses.
That was Team Nine, this morning. Bunch of old guys with experience and slowness. They might catch up while he's lying in this bed.

Stuck in the woods. Can't find the village. Don't worry, we'll figure it out.
Ha. Sucks to be you, Twenty-one.

Found the ashes.

What? Where is that? Miguel's brand-new and fancy heart sinks. Zack's team. Great.

It's harder with just four of us. We really miss you, Liat.
Team Seven lost a member? Miguel blinks back through their updates. So that's what his father meant, and his parents aren't used to not having to be careful about upsetting him anymore. Oh, damn. There was always the possibility she'd just given up, but . . . no. He blinks again to read the reactions, outpourings of sympathy from around the world, cheers from those who are supporting other teams. Some questions about why the competition is being allowed if it's that dangerous. Arguments that it isn't dangerous, she hadn't died inside the game, she'd been injured and not called in the medics until the infection was too advanced.

A sound jolts him away from the scrolling feed. “Yeah?” he calls, hoping it's Nick or—maybe better?—Leah. It's probably one of the doctors, though. He assumes from the green walls and the lack of anyone's correcting him that he's still in ChimeraCube Chartreuse, in the medical wing, but he isn't actually sure of that.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Anderson,” says a voice, familiar and strange. “It's a pleasure to meet you.”

Miguel turns his head.

“Hi? Do I know you?” Doctors don't usually dress all in black, and he
thinks
he's free of needing a mortician, at least for the time being.

The man shrugs and nods at once, somehow. “In a manner
of speaking, yes. I wish I could say I'm sorry to meet under these circumstances, but in fact I'm not. Do you mind if we speak?”

“I guess not,” says Miguel. Instinct itches like his rapidly healing scar. “You're one of the Gamerunners.” He's inherited something from his mother; the man takes it as a statement, comes closer.

“Well done. Yes, I am. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“You're welcome. Are you enjoying your new heart?”

“Kind of wish I'd known it was coming,” says Miguel. “Waking up like that was, uh, surprising?”

The man laughs. “I would imagine. However, there was no possibility of warning you, as we didn't know ourselves.”

The words hang between them in the sterile hospital room, all smooth surfaces and that shade of green that's starting to make Miguel vaguely nauseated. Outside the window, if it's a real window, the sun is on a gentle slide downward but nowhere near setting. Miguel takes it in while his brain absorbs the words. “I wasn't supposed to get my heart after that level.”

“I
am
glad I chose you. No, though I have no doubt you would have found it eventually, if your bioheart had been up to the challenge. When you collapsed, I made a decision.”

“Um. Thanks.” What a weird thing to say to the person who held your life in his hands and the choice that saved you.

“Again, you're welcome. I see something in you, Miguel, but I wonder if it's gone now? You're a very good player, always have been. I wasn't aware of you until you entered the competition, because even I cannot keep track of everyone, but I did my research, and of course I've been watching along with the rest of the world. Do you still want to play, or is that fire extinguished?”

“Are you kidding? I want to keep playing.”

The man smiles widely. “Well, that is good news. This is easier than I expected. I was prepared for you to be tempted to return home to your family.”

“I was,” Miguel admits, “but not for long.”

“Good. It would be a shame to lose you.”

“Out of curiosity, what would happen to my team if I just stopped?”

The man wanders over to the window, looks out. “That . . . has been a subject of some debate, if I'm honest. But we have agreed that if the leader retires or is . . . otherwise indisposed, the team must withdraw. Losing any other member is not such a problem.”

“Because you made the best people the leaders?”

Laughter. It's dry, rasping.
Old,
though the man is young enough. Then again, lots of people have lung damage from the air. “It's good to see your ego is as healthy as your heart,” he says. “That is a consideration, but it's more, too.
Think. I know you have figured it out.”

Miguel shifts under the Gamerunner's gaze. It'd be easier to think if he wasn't being stared at. He closes his eyes. “Our alignments,” he says. So they have been watching, listening. He'd never posted a status about that. It's not surprising, but it's useful to know that nothing in the game is safe. Or sacred.

“Well done. There aren't that many of you. I mean, millions, of course, but fewer than any of the other types. Only a small percentage of those are entertaining to watch, only some of
those
have talent, et cetera, et cetera.”

“So you need me,” says Miguel, a smile beginning to form. The man laughs again.

“Don't get too cocky, Mr. Anderson. I've already given you the thing you wanted most in the world.”

That's true. Maybe Miguel would be more grateful if he could really believe it.

“I want you to think about how limitless your chances will be if you return. Until now, you have played Chimera—and well—under a constant threat. Out of fear, you have never pushed yourself to your limits, and of course that fear wasn't unjustified.” He gestures at Miguel in the bed. “But it isn't a worry anymore. Think of how good you could be. Think of how far you could go.”

“Is this about that girl who died? You don't want the publicity.”